One of the nice navigation features in many web-browsers is that a long click on the Forward and Backward buttons brings down a list of the next and previous sites in sequence so one could jump back two sites, for example.

It turns out that the Finder sports the same ability. A long click on the arrow buttons in the toolbar brings downs a menu with the previous and the next directories visited in that Finder window. This works in Mac OS X 10.7. I think I tried it with 10.6 as well as 10.4 before I upgraded to Lion and it did not work, but I am not sure.

That's nice, and kudos to the hint submitter for finding it, but come on Apple, the Finder is in serious need of some enhancements! It is by far the least powerful file browser out there in comparison to Win 7 and Ubuntu. Maybe that's by design (Apple's penchant for simplicity), but if it weren't for Column View, the Finder would be pretty gnarly. Think of how little it has advanced since 1984.

I wish Apple would just buy TotalFinder, or at least try and build its features in. This is a very stable add-on, and worth its small price, but I don't think the Finder should be lacking these features in the first place!

The graphical access does seem new but note that the keyboard shortcuts that mimic Safari CMD-[ or CMD-] for forward and back have been available for as many operating system versions as I can remember. I find them quite useful sometimes for jumping around the Finder.